Ali put her hand on his arm. “Hang on, before you call her. Don’t you want to talk about…” She trailed off, shrugged, and splayed her fingers, searching for words.
“Exactly,” said Zach. “We’ve talked and talked, and you’ve told me what you want, and I’ve told you what I want, and the upshot is you’re going to do what you want, and I can go hang. So just do it, Ali,” he said, suddenly bone-weary. His eyes were aching, and he rubbed them with his thumbs.
“This is a chance for a completely new start for Elise and me-a new life. We’ll be happier. She can forget all about…”
“All about me?”
“All about all the… upheaval. The stress of the divorce.”
“I’m never going to think it’s a good idea that you take her away from me, so there’s no point you trying to convince me. I’m always going to think it’s unfair. I never contested custody because… because I didn’t want to make things worse. Make them harder, for her and for us. And this is how you thank me for that. You move her three thousand miles away, and turn me into some guy who sees her two or three times a year and sends her presents she doesn’t like because he’s so far out of touch with what she does like…”
“It wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about you…” Ali’s eyes flashed angrily, and Zach saw the guilt there, too; saw that she’d struggled with the decision. Oddly, it made him feel no better that she had.
“How would you feel, Ali? How would you feel in my place?” he asked intently. For a horrifying second, he thought he might cry. But he didn’t. He held Ali’s gaze and made her see; and some emotion caused her cheeks to flush, her eyes to grow bright and desperate. What that emotion was, Zach could no longer read, and just at that moment Elise came rushing downstairs and flew into her mother’s arms.
As they left, Zach hugged Elise and tried to keep smiling, tried to reassure her that she didn’t need to feel guilty. But when Elise started to cry, he couldn’t keep it up-his smile became a grimace and tears blurred his last view of her, so in the end he stopped trying to pretend it was all right. Elise gulped and sobbed and scrubbed at her eyes with her knuckles, and Zach held her at arm’s length and wiped her face for her.
“I love you very much, Els. And I’ll see you very soon,” he said, giving the statements no ambiguity, no hint of a maybe. She nodded, taking huge, hitching breaths. “Come on. One last smile for your dad before you go.” She gave it a good try, her small, round mouth curling up at the corners even as sobs shook her chest. Zach kissed her and stood up.
“Go on,” he said to Ali brutally. “Go on now.” Ali reached down for Elise’s hand and towed her away along the pavement to where her car was parked. Elise turned and waved from the backseat. Waved until the car was out of sight down the hill and around the corner. And when it was, Zach felt something switch off inside him. He couldn’t tell what it was, but he knew it was vital. Numb, he sank down onto the front step of the gallery, and sat there for a long time.
For the next few days Zach went through the motions of his everyday life, opening the gallery, trying to fill his time with odd jobs, reading auction catalogs, closing the gallery again; all with this same numbness dogging his every step. There was an emptiness to everything he did. Without Elise there to wake him up, to need breakfast, to need entertaining and impressing and scolding, there seemed little point to any of the other things he did. For a while now he had thought that losing Ali was the worst thing that would happen to him. Now he knew that losing Elise was going to be much, much worse.
“You haven’t lost her. You’ll always be her dad,” said his friend Ian, over a curry the following week.
“An absentee father. Not the kind of father I wanted to be,” Zach replied morosely. Ian said nothing for a moment. He was obviously finding it hard to think of comforting things to say; he was finding Zach’s company hard. Zach felt bad about that, but he couldn’t help it. He had no bravado left; he felt neither brave, nor tough, nor resilient. When Ian tentatively suggested that the move to the States might prove liberating for Zach, might give him a fresh start, too, Zach looked up at him bleakly, and his friend fell into awkward silence. “Sorry, Ian. Crap company, aren’t I?” he apologized eventually.
“Terrible,” Ian agreed. “Thank God they do a good karai here, or I’d have left after the first ten minutes.”
“Sorry. I just… I miss her already.”
“I know. How’s business?”
“Going under.”
“Not seriously?”
“Quite possibly.” Zach smiled at the horrified expression on Ian’s face. Ian’s own company-organizing one-off adventures of a lifetime for people-was expanding all the time.
“You can’t let that happen, mate. There must be something you can do?”
“Like what? I can’t force people to buy art. They either want to buy it or they don’t.” In truth, there was more he should be doing. He should be dealing in smaller, more affordable pictures and increasing his stock that way. He should be getting up to London more; calling other dealers and past customers to remind them of his existence. Booking a stand at the London Art Fair. Anything to get the gallery some clients. It was what he’d done in the year before officially opening, and the year after that. Now the very thought tired him. It seemed to require more energy than he had left.
“What about those Charles Aubrey pictures? You must be able to sell them? Buy in some new stock instead, get things moving and shaking…” Ian suggested.
“I could… I could put two of them up for auction,” Zach conceded. But not Delphine, he thought. “But once they’re gone… that’s it. That’s the heart of the gallery gone. Who knows when-or if-I’d be able to afford to buy any more of his work? I’m meant to specialize in Aubrey. I’m an Aubrey expert, remember?”
“Yes, but… needs must, Zach. It’s business. Try not to make it so personal.”
Ian was right, but it was personal to Zach; probably far too personal. He’d known of Charles Aubrey for a very long time, since he was a small boy. On every strained, too-quiet visit to his grandparents, he would spend time standing next to his grandma, staring at the picture that hung in her dressing room. It would have hung in pride of place in the living room, his grandma told him, but Grandpa did not approve. When he asked why not, Zach was told, I was one of Aubrey’s women. The old woman always had a sparkle in her eye and a pleased smile pulling at her creased lips when she said these words. One time, Zach’s father heard her say it and put his head around the door to scowl at her. Don’t go filling the boy’s head with that nonsense, he muttered. When they went back downstairs, Zach’s father was staring at Grandpa, but the older man seemed unwilling to meet his gaze. One more of those tense, hung moments that Zach hadn’t understood at the time, that had made him half dread visiting his grandparents and half dread the black mood his father would be in for days afterwards.
The Aubrey print in his grandma’s dressing room was a scene of rocky cliffs and a churning silver sea, the cliff tops vibrant with long grass smoothed flat beneath the wind. A woman was walking along the cliff path with one hand clamped onto her hat and the other held slightly away from her, as if for balance. It was slightly impressionistic, the brushwork quick and impulsive, and yet the whole scene was alive. Looking at it, Zach expected to hear gulls and feel the touch of salt spray on his face. You could smell the wet rocks, hear the wind buffeting in your ears. That’s me, his grandma told him proudly, on more than one occasion. When she looked at the picture, it was clear she was looking into the past. Her eyes fell out of focus, drifted away to distant times and places. And yet Zach had always thought there was something slightly uneasy about the picture. It was the way the figure looked so vulnerable, on the cliff top. Walking all alone, and holding one hand out to steady herself, as if the wind wasn’t blowing in off the sea but off the land instead, and threatening to pull her over the edge into the choppy water below. If he looked at it for long enough, the picture sometimes gave Zach that spongy feeling in his knees that he got at the top of a ladder.